


Dites-moi pourquoi la vie est gai

by eafay70



Series: "Dites-moi pourquoi la vie est gai" Songbook [1]
Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Catharsis, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Getting Together, Multi, Musical, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-13 20:42:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19258831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eafay70/pseuds/eafay70
Summary: Summer 2018: After Worlds and a vacation in Spain, Tito spends a lot of time with his best friend, Mat. Unfortunately for Tito's sanity, Mat loves musicals enough to initiate spontaneous production numbers at any given opportunity - and Tito's romantic feelings towards Chabby and Luc give Mat plently of opportunities.tl;dr Summerland: The Musical





	Dites-moi pourquoi la vie est gai

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lotts (LottieAnna)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LottieAnna/gifts).
  * Inspired by [five, six, seven, eight](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11494335) by [lotts (LottieAnna)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LottieAnna/pseuds/lotts). 



> Dear Lotts:
> 
> This is your Poly Hockey author. (waves hi) I sincerely hope you enjoy this take on the universe you created in "five, six, seven, eight" combined with your prompt of "anything ft. Worlds 2018 and nosy Mat Barzal."  
> I'm a very big fan of yours, so I spent about five minutes alternating between squeals of joy and groans of dread after I was assigned to write for you. Once I calmed down, I thought you would appreciate a title from Broadway, looked up the lyrics to the only Broadway song in French I could think of, and found the perfect title! =D Please let me know what you think!  
> xoxoxo, Your Poly Hockey Author
> 
>  
> 
> And now to address everyone else! =D  
> In Lotts' fic "five, six, seven, eight," characters burst into musical numbers when their feelings overwhelm them. As the presence of a musical number sung by McDonald's employees implies, these feelings are not limited to romantic ones. When a character hums a melody they don't know, it's from a song someone else (such as a love interest) was singing while the character slept. That's probably all you need to know universe-wise for this fic; feel free to ask me any questions that may arise!
> 
> In real life, Tito was part of a group of Team Canada guys who went to Spain after 2018 Worlds, where Canada came in fourth place. I think Luc was there, but I'm not entirely certain.  
> At some point after that, Tito was one of a number of hockey guys who joined Mat at the Barzal vacation home in Summerland, BC. For this fic, I've imagined that Tito stayed with Mat and the Barzals for a couple of days before going with them to Summerland. I don't actually know if Luc and/or Chabby went to Summerland, but I've decided that they did for fic purposes. (I probably should have done actual research to figure it out, but life ate up a lot of my time.) Dante Fabbro's family being neighbors of the Barzal family in Summerland is true!
> 
> Untagged characters with brief appearances and/or mentions:  
> -Mat's RL family (parents and sister)  
> -Dante Fabbro  
> -Tyson Jost

Tito sat next to Mat and sighed. "I don't feel any better about it," he confessed. "I thought a really nice vacation would help, but it didn't."

"I should say not," Mat replied, never one to mince words. "You look even unhappier now than when the tournament ended. Do you feel worse about it?"

"No, not about the tournament," Tito answered carefully. He'd been tempted to limit his response to one word, but Mat would have called him out on the lie by omission, so he hadn't bothered.

"I knew it!" Mat cackled. "I knew there was something else on your mind! Tell me everything!"

"Absolutely not," Tito scowled.

Undeterred, Mat leaned closer. "You know you want to let it out, so tell me what your frown's about."

Tito stood up to get some distance from Mat, hoping it would cause the sound of plucking strings to stop. "I refuse to encourage your obsession with spontaneous musicals."

"Anthony Beauvillier!" Mat gasped in (not actually) mock horror. "You know full well that I love both spontaneous musicals and written musicals equally!"

"Oh, yeah?" Intense piano chords were now joining the plucking strings, but at this point Tito knew better than to fight it. "Well, you know what I absolutely HATE?!"

"No, tell me!" Mat grinned.

And so Tito launched into a song detailing how he really, really hated Mat Barzal for being nosy and completely unhelpful when it came to romantic matters. Mat interjected in his usual speak-singing style, insisting that he gave excellent advice which Tito - and everyone else on Team Canada and/or the Islanders - chose to ignore at their own peril. Eventually, they started groaning in frustration at each other, until Tito sat back down on the bed and melodically sighed, "But you're still my best friend, Mat Barzal."

"Ditto, Tito." The song ended.

Tito rubbed his forehead. "I don't know if Luc joining the team late made things better or worse at the tournament. I thought I had a chance of getting over Chabby without Luc there."

"Nope." Mat shook his head furiously. "If you're going to get over one, you'll have to get over the other. We've talked about this: you're in love with each of them -"

"- but I want to be with both of them, so being with only one of them wouldn't work out." Tito sighed again. "Who am I kidding? I don't have a chance with either of them."

"Not this again," Mat groaned. He stood up, accompanied by a military-style drumming cadence. A song ensued in which he insisted that Tito was just plain fabulous and deserving of all sort of happy things, including but not limited to two boyfriends clearly in love with him and each other.

"You're WRONG!!!!" Tito proclaimed over the sound of trumpets. Rather than rehash the argument over whether Luc and/or Chabby could possibly be in love with him, he sang about the fact that Luc and Chabby didn't seem to be anything more than best friends, providing various points of evidence from the recently ended tournament. Mat countered with his own points, all of which Tito ignored for the sake of his own sanity, as per usual.

The song didn't have a normal ending. Instead, a melody Tito had heard quite a few times during his friendship with Mat began to play. Mat blinked, then walked into the hallway and provided backup vocals to his mother and Liana singing "The Sad Movie Lament." For his part, Tito stayed in Mat's bedroom and mentally admitted that he wouldn't mind spontaneous musicals so much if he had someone other than Mat with whom to sing.

* * *

"Remind me who's coming tomorrow?" Tito asked as he and Mat unpacked in the Barzal family's Summerland house.

"There are only two people you have to think about," Mat answered with a very obvious wink.

Tito groaned. "You're not going to lock us in a closet or anything, are you?"

"Liana pointed out that we don't have any closets big enough for three hockey players," Mat sighed in obvious disappointment. "Is it too much to ask that you guys talk without me doing something drastic like that?"

"Probably," Tito admitted. He focused on his clothes, not wanting to discuss the matter further. Even though he'd already known that Luc and Chabby were also coming here, he'd hoped that the other guys would distract Mat from any matchmaking efforts; he really should have known better.

"What are you humming?"

Tito paused. "I have no idea. But it feels like it was in French." He shook his head and went back to the task at hand. "That doesn't make any sense."

"One of your boys was singing while you were asleep!" Mat grinned. "Ooh, I love it when things come together like this!"

"I'm not going to dignify that with the obvious joke."

* * *

Tito woke up humming the same melody, again feeling like it was in French. He didn't say anything to Mat, who simply smirked and nudged Liana with his elbow while everyone ate. She rolled her eyes and moved away from her brother; Tito sympathized with the sentiment.

Over the course of the morning and early afternoon, various hockey guys arrived at the backyard area unofficially shared by the Barzal and Fabbro families. Tito made a point of saying hi to everyone, not just the guys he already knew well - if anyone had asked, he would have said it was just good Canadian manners, but the truth was that he wanted to be distracted from the inevitable.

Unfortunately, the inevitable found him in the form of the same melody Tito had been humming for two days. He turned around and saw Luc slowly approaching. "Hey, PLD!"

"Hey!" He hurried over and pulled him into a hug. "I missed you."

"Me, too." Before Tito could think of anything else to say, he heard the melody again and stepped back from Luc, who...wasn't humming. "Do you hear something?"

"Yeah." He turned around and waved. "Chabby!"

"My dudes!" Chabby gave Luc a hug, then gave one to Tito. "You need to join our Skype calls, Beau."

Tito gulped. "I -"

"Okay, everyone's here!" Mat announced loudly. "Time to go over the most important rule of Summerland: Always use sunscreen because...SHIRTS ARE EVIL!"

"YEAH!" They all burst into an impressively well-choreographed song on the topic. 

At the end of the song, Tito found himself between Luc and Chabby, all of their hands intertwined. It was a little sticky due to the heat, but unsurprisingly, Tito didn't mind.

_"Mes amis !"_

Chabby pulled away one of his hands to facepalm. "Is he intentionally making his accent so...so..."

"European?" Luc suggested. He freed one of his hands, then pulled Chabby's hand back into the pile, then worked in his own hand again.

"No, horrific!"

The speaker of the accented French gasped as he walked over. "You are my guests!"

"We're also your friends, which means we're obliged to be brutally honest," Tito explained. "Nothing personal, Barz."

_"Magnifique !"_

And so began a quartet in French about how awesome it was to be bilingual. It was...weird, but Tito was used to that sort of thing when it came to Mat.

* * *

That night, Tito couldn't sleep. He tried everything he could think of, but it just wasn't working. Not wanting to risk waking up Mat, he put on his sandals and snuck out of the house, checking that the spare key was in its hiding place outside before making his way to the water. With a soft sigh, he allowed his thoughts to wander.

Tito knew he was lucky to have a best friend like Mat, who always wanted the best for him even if they disagreed on what that was. Sure, Tito had been tempted to metaphorically drop the gloves when Mat had insisted that Tito sit between Chabby and Luc at dinner and during the Chel tournament afterwards, and he was pretty sick of the 'Best of Broadway' album Mat used to fall asleep, but Mat's heart was in the right place, so to speak. If Tito had the chance to go back in time and learn more English before a certain tournament, he wouldn't do it, so as not to risk jeopardizing his first conversation with Mat in French.

"French..." he whispered to himself. A low xylophone note sounded. "The language of love." A slightly higher note sounded. "Not a love language - that's something else. But..."

And so he proceeded to sing about French not being a good love language, considering he couldn't express his love for two fellow Quebecers. It was the first time he'd spontaneously sung without it being a reprise of something he'd sung earlier with Mat - and, quite frankly, it felt much more cathartic than any of those times. Only when the xylophone notes faded away did Tito realize that his song's melody was the same one he, Chabby, and Luc had each hummed the day before.

"I really, really hate you, Mat Barzal," he sang. "You'll be like, 'I told you so!', smug as hell."

* * *

The problem with having a cathartic epiphany through song was that Tito had no idea what to do about it. He bought himself time to think about it by as sitting far away from Luc and Chabby during breakfast as possible, but it didn't help all that much since they kept glancing at him. Mat noticed all this and started waggling his eyebrows, so Tito changed the topic by wondering out loud what shenanigans Dante and Josty were planning for the day, thereby setting off a conversation about locker room pranks.

After slathering on sunscreen while humming the big dance number from the day before, the guys went outside for a few hours of spikeball before having lunch near the water. Mat wandered up to Tito and whispered, "I know you couldn't sleep last night, and I know PLD and Chabby were humming when they came downstairs today. You know what I think should happen."

Tito nodded silently, then looked past Mat and spotted the two aforementioned guys some distance away, deep in conversation. He smiled at Mat before walking over to them. "Xylophones make a pretty sound, eh?"

Luc smiled nervously. Chabby reached out slowly and rested his hand on Tito's shoulder. "I thought the music was just the hockey gods building my tolerance for that troubadour best friend of yours, but I guess I thought wrong."

"Considering he wanted to shove the three of us into a closet, you thought right." Tito leaned into Chabby's touch and smiled at Luc. "What did you think?"

"That my dreams were coming true." Luc rested his hand on Tito's other shoulder, prompting a smile from Chabby. "We're going to have to have a long talk or two, just the three of us with our schedules and a list of rules or something."

"Yes, but not right now," Tito insisted. "Right now, we just need to decide who kisses whom first."

"Dibs on Tito!" Chabby and Luc said in perfect unison. They frowned in mock annoyance.

Tito laughed. "How about you guys kiss each other, and I'll carefully observe in order to decide who should kiss me first?"

"Works for me," Chabby decided. 

Luc hummed in pretend thought. "Yeah, it works for me, too."

They took a few steps towards each other, their hands not leaving Tito's shoulders. After a moment of gazing into each other's eyes, they kissed. "This is the hottest thing I've ever seen," Tito said, licking his lips. "Unfortunately, my careful observation isn't helping me decide who should kiss me first."

Chabby and Luc ended the kiss, then proceeded to play 'rock, paper, scissors.' Paper beat rock, prompting Luc to fist-pump with glee before kissing Tito passionately. Tito was fairly certain his heart was going to beat out of his chest or something equally dramatic.

"I could watch you guys do that all day, but I really want a turn." Chabby nudged Luc until he moved away, then kissed Tito so hard that he nearly fell over.

"You two are a hell of a sight," Luc declared.

Tito stepped back to catch his breath. He could hear a xylophone start to play a slightly different melody from the one they'd all hummed; the grins on Luc's and Chabby's faces told him that they could hear it, too.

And so the three of them declared via song that they were now boyfriends, only partially thanks to Mat, who led the rest of the guys in the chorus. It was a wonderful experience, even if Mat ended the song by smugly declaring, "I told you so AND you so AND you so!!!!!!!!!!!"

**Author's Note:**

> **Song List:**
> 
>   * "I Really, Really Hate You, Mat Barzal" - Tito, Mat
>   * "I'm Glad I'm Very Far From Mat Barzal" - Luc, Chabby (during the groaning parts of the above song) (Luc and Chabby aren't physically together, so they don't know it's a duet)
>   * "Tito, You Deserve It All" - Mat, Tito
>   * "Sad Movie Lament" - Liana, Mrs. Barzal, Mat
>   * "If French Is a Love Language (#1)" - Luc (while Chabby and Tito are asleep)
>   * "If French Is a Love Language (#2)" - Chabby (while Tito and Luc are asleep)
>   * "Shirts Are Evil!" - the Boyz of Summerland
>   * "C'est Bon Le Bilinguisme" - Mat, Tito, Chabby, Luc
>   * "If French Is a Love Language (#3)" - Tito (while Luc and Chabby are asleep) (includes a very brief reprise of "I Really, Really Hate You, Mat Barzal")
>   * "So Let's All Be Our Boyfriends/Finale" - Ensemble
> 

> 
> * * *
> 
> Random things:  
> -I can't help thinking this would make a really fun podfic if ever I got around to writing out the songs. (However, I shouldn't be singing under current circumstances, meaning someone else should record it.)  
> -Speaking of which, do let me know if you're interested in any of the songs and I'll do my best to write them out! (The exception is "C'est Bon Le Bilinguisme" because I don't speak French; the random bits in the fic all came from Wiktionary.)  
> -Tito refers to Mat's style as "speak-singing." I'm not sure if this is a formal term in the musical theater world or elsewhere, but it's the term I've most often seen to refer to Rex Harrison and similar performers. Rather than actually follow a melody, they just talk and occassionally change pitch. (I'm not sure how else to explain it.)  
> -The vibe for "Shirts Are Evil!" is a mix between "What Time Is It?" and "I Don't Dance" from "High School Musical 2." And, yes, the 'z' in 'Boyz' is intentional.  
> -I considered making Mat/Dante/Josty a thing in this fic, but I didn't want to make things too complicated in terms of plotlines. You might still see it if you squint; if you squint differently, you might see Dante/Josty or maybe even Mat/Dante. -shrug-

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [I Really, Really Hate You, Mat Barzal](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23318059) by [eafay70](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eafay70/pseuds/eafay70)




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